Progress Update #90 (Patreon)

There's a "new feature" that was implemented into After Effects two years ago, but I just found out about it last month. It's called Tapered Strokes:

Something that I desperately wanted ever since I started using the software over a decade ago. Totally found out about it by accident while I was messing around in the shape layer menu, and it really impressed me! This is the kind of feature that you'd only find in Adobe Illustrator. Up until now if you wanted a tapered line in After Effects, you needed to manually vector the shape of the line, or be very creative with mask layers, and they are both not ideal for animation. There's also the option of bringing rasterized lines from photoshop, but to animate that you need to use puppet pins, which can look really bad, and if you have multiple lines it just turns into a huge mess.

Now, I can recreate the look of a digital brush stroke by using just a single vector path, which allows me to create better line animations, and to easily add modifiers/effects to the paths, like the zig-zag or the wiggle. It worked very well with these cartoony sea creatures, but it's not very noticeable on Gura, which is unfortunate because it took a very long time to rig all these lines. And that's the main downside of this textured art style that I use in the hololive animations, every shape has to be in a separate layer to create this look, and I have to manually rig everything to a main controller, which takes a bit of time to do. And depending on the character, adding these outlines can even double the workload. It's something that I'll have to keep in mind for future projects.

I think it's going to take another three weeks to finish this. There's a lot of painting to do, but most of the character animation is done. What I'm most concerned about is a scene with a lot of fire in it, I'm not sure how I'm going to animate that. I want to do something similar to those torches in the Kabocha animation but on a much bigger scale, and that might not work out. Worst case scenario I'll just have to use real fire footage from Action Essentials 2 :p